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The third annual LaunchPad, where we highlight cool companies in our industry, is open for submissions. The release is here.

This year we’re doing something new – having a panel of VC judges who critique your presentation on stage. It’s a great chance for a handful of companies – 6 to 8 – to present in front of all 1200 of the Web 2 attendees and press/bloggers.

Also, we are not charging a fee to enter or win, and the competition is open to any company that is pre-public – not just companies who are launching. If you want to enter your company, head here.

Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America’s AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet’s equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.

And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google’s deal with China’s censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users.

This from the cover opinion piece. More on Google in the issue here. The conclusions and coverage are, well, familiar.

He’s got good timing. The future for Google’s new CFO is going to be rough: Think Microsoft after Windows had its initial run. Ho to keep the Street happy when it expects double digit growth every quarter. Ick.

And slowly, creators get a better deal. From the NYT coverage of the South Park creators’s novel ad revenue split-based deal with Viacom:

But what is likely to draw the most attention in Hollywood is not the richness of the pact, but the network’s willingness to share its advertising revenue.

..“The landscape has shifted dramatically,” Mr. Herzog said. “The way of the Web seems to be, there’s a very low barrier to entry, so you don’t need, necessarily, a major media company to be in business, or a movie studio, or whatever it is — you just need to be able to set up shop and go. You’re seeing a lot of guys doing this, funnyordie.com being the best example.” (Funnyordie.com was started this year by the comic actor Will Ferrell and his production partner, Adam McKay.)